Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

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Recordings

'This remarkable German soprano takes us on some giddy flights with superb breath control and a quite amazing concentration of vocal energy. But she n ...'It's hard to dispute Roger Vignoles's claim that Anne Schwanewilms is 'a great singing actress'. That's clear in every song, where both the overall t ...» More

A further instalment in Hyperion’s major series, skilfully masterminded by accompanist Roger Vignoles, introduces the American soprano Kiera Duffy. The highlight of this balanced recital is the coloratura Op 68 Brentano-Lieder, which owes its rich ...» More

Children of Spring in colourful throngs,
Fluttering blossoms, fragrant breezes,
Languishing, jubilant songs of love
Storm my heart from every shrub.
Children of Spring swarm round my heart,
Whisper their way in with flattering words,
Clamour their way in with drunken cries,
Rattle at doors long since closed.
Children of Spring surrounding my heart,
What do you seek there so urgently?
Have I lately revealed to you in a dream,
Asleep beneath a blossoming tree,
Did the morning breezes rumour to you
That I have locked your sweet playmates
In my heart,
Where secretly and blissfully I hide their picture?

This is the first of two settings of Nikolaus Lenau which Strauss published in 1891 as his Opus 26, the other being the very different O wärst du mein! (see volume 2 of this series). It was a verse-drama by the Hungarian-born Lenau which had three years earlier inspired the first of Strauss’s great tone poems, Don Juan. Here the poem’s eager questioning of the Children of Spring is set to a delightfully Lisztian piano part, full of rippling arpeggios, which, somewhat unaccountably, run out of steam on the last page. With the voice stranded above the stave it is hard to avoid a feeling that Strauss didn’t quite know how to finish the song off. Or was he trying to suggest a sudden shyness on the part of the singer?

Nikolaus Lenau inspired Robert Schumann to some of his most psychologically complex settings, and one wonders what Strauss might have produced had he set more than just the two Lenau poems that form his Op 26, especially given the daring and forward-looking character of this, the second of the pair. Almost atonal in its chromaticism, with dramatic shifts of key and mood, it is an anguished and desperate cry from the heart, if anything more reminiscent of an operatic scena than of a conventional Lied. The first stanza is full of original touches—the semitonal shift on ‘So aber’ that punctures the unattainable dream of the first line; the empty, unaccompanied recitative of ‘Ich kann es meinem Schicksal nicht vergeben’ and the quasi-orchestral upsurge that precedes it. In the second stanza the harmony becomes as unhinged as the protagonist’s emotions, veering wildly from one tonal centre to another, while the piano’s extended playout is left hanging darkly between F sharp minor and B flat minor, no more reconciled than the poet is to his fate.